Art and theater reviews covering Seattle to Olympia, Washington, with other art, literature and personal commentary.
If you want to ask a question about any of the shows reviewed here please email the producing venue (theater or gallery) or email me at alec@alecclayton.com. If you post questions in the comment section the answer might get lost.

Friday, July 29, 2016

I am taking a break from writing theater reviews. Watch for upcoming season previews in both The News Tribune and the Weekly Volcano and for a story about Olympia's story slam, Story Oly in the Aug. 11 edition of the Weekly Volcano.

Photo: “Len
(Roofer)” colored pencil, by John Smolko, courtesy American Art Company

Surprisingly
impactful show at American Art Company

Published in the Weekly Volcano, July 28, 2016

“Len (Roofer)” colored pencil, by John Smolko, courtesy American Art Company

The Colored
Pencil Society of America's 24 International Exhibition at American Art
Company is surprising on many levels. For starters, the 119 works of art that
crowd the gallery walls are really paintings, not drawings, by almost any
criteria, despite being done with pencils. Second, the detailed technical
expertise and attention to detail in each and every work is mind-boggling.

As a longtime
artist, critic and former teacher, I feel obligated to point out that pretty
pictures skillfully executed do not necessarily qualify as art. (I think this
is what the critic Peter Plagens was referring to when he coined the phrase
“wall fodder.”) Art must at least strive toward
something higher — call me an elitist or a snob if you must, but art should be
transformative.

These are not
transformative works, but they are mind-boggling in their skill. The intensity,
dedication and patience it must have taken for these artists to create these
works is almost beyond comprehension.

Nearly all of the
works shown are photo-realist or trompe l’oeil paintings. In most, you have to
look close and hard to even see that there are pencil marks; in some, I would
defy anyone to see a single pencil mark, not even with a magnifying glass.

There are a few exceptions, and I wish there were more. One of the
exceptions is John Smolko's "Len (Roofer),” a portrait of a working man
taking a break from his work. He sits on the peak of a roof looking out in a
contemplative stare. It is a highly realistic picture, yet Smolko does not
attempt to hide his pencil marks. There are definite contour lines, most noticeably
on the arms. Energetic, swirling lines almost reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock
painting fill the background and even overlap the figure in places. The use of
these marks seems to be the artist’s way of reminding the viewer that it is,
after all, a drawing. Plus, these marks unify figure and background and
energize the picture.

Another exception
is Jill Kline's "Cause and Effect." This is a picture of a young
woman seen in an extremely foreshortened view standing on or above what looks
like a landscape seen from an airplane. There is a heroic and almost unreal
quality to the image, even though she too is drawn realistically. The shading
is simplified and looks like it was done with pastels,
and there are definite outlines around the body that, like the marks in
Smolko’s drawing, announce that yes, this is a drawing.

Perhaps the most
astounding of the many astoundingly hyper-realist works is Jesse Lane’s
“Resolve.” This is a portrait of a dripping-wet man in extreme close-up. Water
drips down his face and pours off his chin. The background is solid black, and
his face glows as if under a spotlight. The luminosity and heightened contrast
of this one is powerful, but may be a little too stagey for some viewers.

There are a lot of flower pictures, many portraits, a lot of old things
— such as old typewriters and rusted old cars and trucks — a few landscapes and
animal pictures and dreamscapes. As noted, they are all realistic in style.
Most are also nicely composed. They have to be admired for their technical skill.
They also have hefty price tags, ranging from around $2,000 to $20,000.

Despite what
might have been implied by my earlier remarks about pretty and skillful not
being sufficient to constitute art, I very much enjoyed seeing this show.

Friday, July 22, 2016

The Creative Colloquy team listening to a reading at B Sharp Coffee House from left: Jenni Prange Boran, Joshua Swainston, Melissa Thayer, William Turbyfil, Chris Casella and Jackie Fender. Photo by Lee Heath.

Created by Jackie Fender
a little more than two years ago, Creative Colloquy has become the South
Sound’s preeminent literary event. Creative Colloquy is an online magazine
featuring short stories, novel excerpts, poetry and other literary work by mostly
Tacoma and Olympia writers. Starting in March of 2014, CC started holding
readings at B Sharp Coffee House once a month.

“That first event came along and I anticipated a room full
of just our friends and family. Instead, 60 people came out, many complete
strangers to everyone involved in that first reading, and it was clear from
that day that CC was filling a void that many of us had felt,” Fender says.

The public readings featured, in the first hour, local
authors reading the stuff they had published in the online CC publication,
followed by an open mic in the second hour with brave local writers, some
professional and some beginners, reading their stuff in public for the first
time. It was a huge hit from the start.

“When it comes down to it, I started CC at the prompting of
my writer friends who daydreamed of a platform to share stories. The CC vision
of contributing to the local literary culture has exceeded anything we could
have hoped for. It's a lovely beast where established and novice writers of all
genres can connect and share,” Fender says.

In celebration of their first year, CC published an anthology
of local writers and held a Creative Crawl, a kind of literary arts walk with
readings in many downtown Tacoma venues such as King’s Books, Sanford and Son,
Embellish Multispace Salon and others. CC has now published its second
anthology and is scheduled for a second Creative Crawl in October with readings
at Zodiac Supper Club, Kings Books, Tacoma Cabana, Doyle’s Public House, Odd
Otter, Harmon’s Tap Room, Destiny City Comics and B Sharp.

“We have returning community partners like Drunken Telegraph
and UWT curating line-ups as well as some new faces producing storytelling
hours like Beautiful Angle. The inaugural C3 was pretty amazing and boasted an
impressive attendance and we are looking forward to making this year a larger
and more astonishing production. Should be a lot of fun,” Fender said.

Among the
regular readers at the monthly events are local favorites such as Christian
Carvajal, Titus Burley, Marissa Meyer, William Turbyfil, Lucas Smiraldo, Melissa Thayer and Jennifer
Chushcoff.

This year Olympia CC has started with readings at Traditions
Café, which will move to Forrey’s Forza Banquet Room in Lacey in August.

“It’s amazing to see how much support Creative Colloquy has
gotten,” said assistant director Joshua Swainston. “The witing talents for the
South Sound seems to be an endless well. We never know who’s out there until we
put out the call for submissions, and we are always surprised and delighted by
what we get from the community in return.”

Olympia Little Theatre quotes
the New York Times’ description of Jon Robin Baitz’s Pulitzer Prize nominee
“Other Desert Cities” as a “witty, deeply enjoyable family drama.” Such a
description could easily mislead people into expecting a light comic-drama, and
this play is anything but light comedy. There’s comedy, yes. Biting, witty,
sarcastic word play between five family members whose sophisticated banter
balances on the edge of outright warfare.

Lyman Wyeth (James T.
Patrick) and his wife, Polly (Toni Murray) are the epitome of wealthy Americans
wasting away past their prime in self-satisfied pseudo comfort. Both retired,
he was a B-movie cowboy star famous for long death scenes, and she was a writer
along with her cowriter sister Silda (Bonnie Vandver) of a long-running
television series. The Wyeths are Republican party functionaries. Silda, a
recovering alcoholic, is politically liberal, as are the Wyeth children, Brooke
(Silva Goetz), a successful writer suffering from depression, and Trip (Cameron
Waters), a reality TV producer.

It’s Christmas 2004, and
Brooke has come home from the East Coast to visit her family. She has brought
with her a manuscript of her soon-to-be-published book, an explosive memoir
that reveals family secrets and threatens to destroy whatever family unity
still remains.

The setting is a suitably
beige, ultra-modern desert home beautifully designed by Christopher Valcho that
highlights the false comfort and respectability of the elder Wyeths and
contrasts with the internecine family dynamics.

The writing is intelligent,
and the story structure is classic, building steadily toward an unexpected and
totally satisfying twist at the end.

The ensemble cast is solid.
Patrick plays the family patriarch as a calm and reasonable peace-maker who
quietly seethes with anger. Murray plays Polly as proud and sure of herself but
more willing to let her anger show than is her husband. Waters plays Trip as
laid-back, humorous, and wise beyond his years. Vandver is outlandish and
wonderful as the outspoken Silda, who is disdainful of her sister and
brother-in-law, and who is one-hundred percent on Brooke’s side and encourages
her to not back down on publishing her memoir – which her parents desperately
want her not to do. And this brings us to Brooke, the catalyst of all the
drama. Goetz plays her as a mass of nervous ticks, quickly going from throwing
witty barbs to tossing lethal bombs. She is smart, angry, mistrustful and
filled with self-doubt, all of which she displays with powerful physical acting
that crowds up to the edge of over acting without crossing the line.

“Other Desert Cities” is not
an easy play to watch. It starts out as a sophisticated comedy and quickly
becomes weighty. There is a quietly intense scene near the end that had
audience members the night I saw it holding their breath in anxious
anticipation. That’s good writing, good acting, and good direction from Toni C.
Holm. At approximately two-and-a-half hours, it is a bit wearying, but worth
sitting through. The one major fault is that the actors do not always
project clearly, making some of the dialogue hard to hear. The theater does
have hearing aids available for audience members to check out, but it would
help if the actors wore microphones.

“21st Century Oxpecker” painting by Jason Sobottka, courtesy South Puget Sound Community College

Upon entering the 2016 Southwest Washington Juried Exhibition
at South Puget Sound Community College, my eyes were immediately drawn to
Bernie Bleha’s sculpture, “Minaret,” acrylic on wood, a colorful tower topped
by a playful spire that looks like a tinker toy construction. From there, my
gaze went to Carla Louise Paine’s painting, “I Died for Beauty,” an oil
portrait of a contemporary woman in a flower-strewn interior painted in a style
reminiscent of Rococo portraiture yet in a clearly modern setting. Both the
Bleha sculpture and Paine’s painting are Merit Award selections from juror Esther Luttikhuizen.

“I Died for Beauty,” oil on canvas by Carla Louise Paine, courtesy South Puget Sound Community College

SPSCC has earned a reputation for cutting-edge shows like New York artist Benjamin Enterner’s installation of monstrous
blow-up vinyl sculptures and Amanda McCavour's Embroadered Spaces, and for fun
local shows such as their annual postcard exhibition. Compared to those, this
exhibition is staid and safe. There is very little that is challenging, but
there surely is a lot of good, solid artwork on display, not a badly executed
piece in the show. Paintings dominate. There is not much sculpture, ceramics or
photography. I’ll mention here just a few of my favorite pieces.

Olympia artist Gail Ramsey Wharton has her weird sense of humor on
display with a couple of mixed-media collages: “Modern Family” and “Department of Humor Analysis.” The former is
like Picasso’s “Family of Saltimbanques” moved to a modern-day beach with a
frolicking family with weird faces that don’t match bodies; the latter is
purportedly a graph showing the funniest places to hit a baby with a ball.
Wharton’s collages are bizarre and skillfully executed.

Next to “Modern
Family” are two more beach scenes, these from Marianne Partlow’s “Boys on the
Beach” series, soft and simplified bodies in glowing pastel colors.

David Noah Giles, a recent transplant to Tumwater from Seattle, is
showing a large abstract painting called “Times Square.” Filled with
repetitive, similar but not identical shapes that dance across the surface in
energetic movement, this painting is like an abstract expressionist version of
Mondrian’s abstract city scene with the usual AE drips and splatters and
collage elements that create a rugged surface. Had I been the judge, I would
have picked this one for an award.

Next to Giles’s painting is another large abstract-expressionist
painting, “Through the Rain” by Debra Van Tuinen, a local artist of long
standing in the community. It is a field of bright orange and gold slashes of
paint that almost cover the entire surface of the canvas like sheets of wind
and rain. This is a stunning painting that captures the emotional power of a
storm without resorting to imitative depiction of the subject matter.

Another favorite is Jason Sobottka’s “21st Century Oxpecker.”
I had to Google Oxpecker to find out it is a kind of bird. I don’t remember
seeing a bird in this painting, and there’s no mention of a bird in the notes I
took. What I do remember seeing is a rhinoceros all decked out and ready for
interstellar war, with glitter and what the artist calls “googly-eyes.” This is
a funny, inventive, and nicely painted image.

There are a lot of talented artists in Southwest Washington. This show
offers ample proof of that.

Friday, July 15, 2016

"Modigliani's Muse"plaster, acrylic and crayon on board by Lynette Charters, all photos courtesy the artist

Recent paintings by Lynette Charters

Published in the Weekly Volcano, July 14, 2016

“Housing Boom”

Lynette Charters’ paintings
are unique, not just in her use of media — china marker over acrylic paint
mixed with plaster — but in her way of painting. On wood panels, she creates
fields of heavily textured globs of color that are almost if not completely
non-objective, and then either draws on top of those fields of color with the
markers or creates line drawings by scraping into the not-yet-dried plaster, or
in the case of some of her “muses” series, she tapes off areas to create
negative images of figures in unpainted wood. Typically, similar methods of
painting are seldom effective, because they create a separation between figure and
ground, and because the end result is a
figurative drawing on top of an abstract painting, which
in the hands of lesser artists becomes trite and tricky. Not so in most of Charters’’ paintings. Through
skillful manipulation of paint, she integrates figure and ground and creates a
delicate balance of harmony and contrast between the abstract and the
figurative. Note: not every painting in this show manages to successfully pull
this off, but most do, and they are stunning to see.

Charters’ show fills all
three levels of the Washington Center lobby. Each level represents a different
series: peacocks, houses and muses. The peacocks are joyful, colorfuland ironic, since
they have to do with preening and pomp. The muses, where the bare wood comes
into play, are symbolic of women’s body issues; they reference other works from
art history (for instance, there is one with four skinny women based on
Giacometti sculptures and another based on a painting by Magritte); and the
houses represent urban chaos.

"Magritte's Muse"

“The theme of this exhibition
is primarily about public image. How image is used to manipulate a
position in society, how we are swayed by it and how we can be ultimately
enslaved by projected images, even the ones we project ourselves,” Charters
says.

In “Modigliani’s Muse” there
is a flat image of a women in unpainted wood almost completely obliterated by a
similar female figure that covers it so that only the head, feet and raised
hands of the underneath figure show. The inserted figure is pictured wearing a
light blue dress that merges into the background. The off-the-shoulder dress
exposes one breast, and the woman’s breast and eyes are unpainted knotholes in
the bare wood. The jigsaw puzzle-like integration of upper and lower figures is
masterful in its peekaboo effect andplay between
positive and negative shapes.

"Deep Pockets"

“Deep Pockets” is a creative
explosion of color with a peacock outlined in red
with blue dots on its tail feather floating off into the burning reds and
oranges of the background. The peacock is standing on an oval of unpainted wood
that is part of a dress pattern with instructions and measurements marked. It
is funny and beautiful.

“Housing Boom” depicts
childlike line drawings of houses stacked up and taking off into a stormy sky
like rockets, a playful yet ominous commentary on the real estate market and
the overcrowding and sameness of suburbia.

These are but three of many
works in the show. I wish I had space to write about many more. It’s a large
and impressive show. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

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About Me

I am an artist and writer living in Olympia, Washington. I write an art review column, a theater review column and arts features for the Weekly Volcano, a community theater review column for The (Tacoma) News Tribune and regular arts features for OLY ARTS (Olympia).
My published novels are: This Is Me, Debbi, David; Tupelo; The Freedom Trilogy (a three-book series consisting of The Backside of Nowhere, Return to Freedom and Visual Liberties); Reunion at the Wetside; The Wives of Marty Winters; Imprudent Zeal and Until the Dawn. I've also published a book on art, As If Art Matters. All are available on amazon.com.
I grew up in Tupelo and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and have been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1988 where I am active in many progressive organizations such as PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays).